White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History. by George M. Fredrickson.Oxford University Press. 356 pp. $19.95.

Comparative history is one of those approaches that scholars freely praise, rarely attempt, and often criticize in practice. The history of slavery and race, however, is perhaps the one field where the benefits of comparison have been most widely recognized. Beginning with Frank Tannenbaum’s short but suggestive book, Slave and Citizen (1946), studies cast within the framework of the American hemisphere have generated valuable debates about differences in the legal status of slaves, attitudes toward miscegenation, and demography.

Can a comparison of white supremacy in America and South Africa prove equally fruitful? One immediate answer is that it should because modern South African apartheid and the Jim Crow regime of segregation that prevailed in the American South between the first and second Reconstructions provide an obvious basis for comparison. And indeed this is the premise on which George Fredrickson implies his study was initially launched. For, as he notes at the outset, more than any of the other multiracial societies that European expansion spawned, these two countries “have manifested over long periods of time a tendency to push the principle of differentiation by race to its logical outcome.”

Yet on closer examination, Fredrickson later concludes, Jim Crow and apartheid prove too dissimilar “to sustain an elaborate comparison based on analogy.” Where apartheid has been deemed essential to preserving the dominance of a shrinking white minority, the security of white control in the South never depended on segregation. The South African policy of “native segregation” seeks to prevent blacks from living near or even passing among whites except as whites require their presence as workers and servants. So rigid a form of geographical segregation has never arisen in the United States.

Apartheid justifies this physical separation with its theory of “separate development,” which holds that each identifiable volk, white or black, should be enabled to pursue its particular destiny. While black Americans have fashioned their own folk culture, they also share—to an extent inconceivable in South Africa—many elements of the larger national culture. And although Jim Crow did strip the freedmen and their descendants of essential rights, their ultimate claim to citizenship could never be denied and it survived to provide the basis for the modern assault on segregation and discrimination. In South Africa, by contrast, blacks acquire political identity only in their “homelands,” those impoverished reservations created to legitimate, however transparently, the essential doctrines of apartheid.

So the ultimate results and refinements of white supremacy cannot by themselves justify the comparison. Nor does the story depend simply on tracing the evolution of racist – attitudes that the 17th-century settlers of both societies carried with them. For racism—defined not in the current sense of discrimination but more strictly as a belief in the inferiority of biologically defined groups—emerged only over time, as one element (not even the most important) within a larger cluster of conditions and attitudes generating white supremacist doctrines.

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What does make sustained comparison possible, Fredrickson suggests, is that both societies passed through common phases in the long-term development of these ideologies. The opening chapters of his book examine four aspects of this process: contacts with indigenous populations; the growth of racial slavery; attitudes toward miscegenation; and responses to the challenges to racial exploitation launched by Northern reformers and Republicans in this country and British officials and humanitarians in South Africa. In two final chapters, Fredrickson discusses more recent developments: the role of black labor in industrializing economies, and 20th-century forms of legal segregation.

Although these chapters get a bit distended chronologically, on the whole they serve their purpose well. Within each chapter Fredrickson makes a series of comparisons that are at once interesting and instructive. Specific problems of historical interpretation are succinctly appraised; relevant theories from other social sciences are gracefully invoked.

Yet the cumulative effect of all these comparisons is to make the reader skeptical about the whole enterprise. For when it comes to describing the South African and American (or really Southern) variations on these themes, it becomes apparent that the two societies were always markedly different. Similarities there were, but these seem consistently less important than the contrasts, which turn not on matters of detail but on some of the most critical issues.

A study of white supremacy is necessarily an inquiry into the dominant group’s sense of its cultural identity and communal purpose. Only in the 19th century did the Afrikaners begin to develop the kind of self-consciousness that the American colonists had fashioned relatively early. The initial Cape settlement was only a way-station on the route to the Dutch East Indies; it served none of the larger imperial purposes that the English colonies in America fulfilled. Nor did the dispossession of the natives produce equivalent results. Americans justified their westward migrations with the claim that a primitive and inefficient people were being properly supplanted by civilized, productive settlers carrying out a manifest national destiny. The trekboers who pushed beyond the Cape adopted the pastoral and even migratory patterns of the native Khoikhoi; they neither sought nor needed to project any sense of mission.

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In both societies, Fredrickson argues, “the long experience of enslaving non-whites” constituted the most important source of white supremacist thought. But the American and South African forms of slavery differed radically. Without plantation slavery, the South could not have cultivated its profitable staples. Arid South Africa, lacking such crops, needed no plantations, and slavery was a convenience only. Other means of controlling labor proved equally effective and less expensive. Moreover, unlike the Americans, who enslaved only blacks, the Dutch drew their slaves from two racially distinct sources: Africans from Mozambique and Madagascar; Asians from India, Malaya, and the East Indies.

This last point also complicates the effort to compare American and South African responses to miscegenation. By 1700 the Americans had established their peculiarly rigid division between white and black, consigning the offspring of mixed relations to the subordinate group. By contrast, South African attitudes remained far more permissive well into the 19th century. Legal marriages with slaves or, more commonly, with the descendants of earlier mixed liaisons were long condoned. To a large, perhaps determining extent, Fredrickson argues, this reflected the demographic needs of a white minority and the absence of a powerful colonial ethos requiring the preservation of a traditional (white) social order. But it also reflected another factor that Fredrickson discusses but does not emphasize. Most mixed marriages involved white males and Asian or Eurasian women, whom whites perceived to be physically less different from themselves than Africans. There was thus a striking difference in the racial equations that whites in both societies found themselves solving.

In both societies, the elaboration of modern ideologies of white supremacy was essentially a 19th-century development, the result of external challenges to the patterns of racial exploitation that had by then matured. But again, the nature and response of the white master classes diverged sharply. The Boers, in fact, were hardly a master class at all. They had never exercised political authority much beyond their patriarchal households, never developed an articulate political ideology, never really learned how to cooperate with one another. What they had learned was how to exploit black labor. When the British (who displaced the Dutch in 1806) challenged this control, the Boers fled to establish free republics in the interior. The Great Trek and later conflicts with British authority finally fostered a sense of national identity. But Afrikaner ideology was crude at best, and required no sophisticated doctrine of race to justify a system of dominance based on security, convenience, and a hearty aversion to manual labor.

Southern planters, on the other hand, were a ruling class in every sense of the term. They were cohesive, self-conscious, articulate, and habituated to the exercise of power. When slavery was attacked, they ceased portraying it as a necessary evil but moved instead to justify it as a positive good on the theory that blacks were, by nature, otherwise incapable of working. Here was racism raised to the level of high social theory. And it was a theory that the white racial caste of the South would go to war to defend.

Although both the Boer free states and the South lost their struggles for sovereignty, the principles and mechanisms of white supremacy were not endangered. But the roles that blacks played in the changing economies of the two societies continued to diverge. The gold and diamonds that gave South Africa a modern economy could be profitably mined only with cheap African labor. American blacks, by contrast, were effectively excluded from the new industrial economy. Poor Southern whites and immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe provided all the cheap labor America needed.

Underlying all of these differences—of circumstance, environment, and history—one finds as well a final basis for describing Fredrickson’s study as an exercise in contrasts. The simple language of the Declaration of Independence and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments has regularly provoked elaborate efforts to compromise, explain away, or resist the egalitarian commitments these documents propose. But the thrust of the egalitarian claim has nevertheless governed the development of American legal, constitutional, and social thought, and of our conceptions of civil rights, politics, and distributive justice. No such claim has ever troubled, much less influenced, the Afrikaners. And so, Fredrickson observes, even in comparing the post-Reconstruction South and modern South Africa, “it is clear in retrospect that the underlying constitutional and ideological imperatives pointed in opposite directions.”

At every stage, then, the task of comparison emphasizes differences rather than similarities. At times, too, the difficulty of finding suitable units for comparison leads Fredrickson into some unusual juxtapositions. For example, the legal disabilities of blacks under Jim Crow are set against modern restrictions imposed on South African Coloreds. To find an American analogy for apartheid, Fredrickson offers an imaginary scenario in which conquered Indians remain a majority of the population but are kept on enlarged reservations as a pool of cheap labor.

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After all this, it is not so surprising to learn that Jim Crow and apartheid cannot be compared, or to conclude that the egalitarian commitments of the American Revolution and of Reconstruction did matter, or to recognize the persistent influence of geography and demography. The range and magnitude of these contrasts thus call into question the point of the comparison. Fredrickson has anticipated this objection. He writes not as a social scientist seeking to build some general model but as a historian pursuing his discipline’s relentless inclination to examine the past for its diversity and complexity. In his introduction, he suggests that the principal value of his study should be to “illuminate equally the special features or particularities” of the two cases. And so he does, marvelously and often persuasively.

Yet one can still argue that such a study has to operate within certain limits. When too many variables explain too many variations, the value of comparison is diluted. The comparisons themselves remain consistently informative, consistently illuminating. But illumination is one thing, explanation another. For a comparative study to be useful as well as illuminating, it must identify factors that might otherwise be ignored and raise issues deserving further consideration.

On these grounds, the book seems less successful than one suspects Fredrickson initially hoped it would be. Few of his key arguments actually rest on comparative insights. They draw their strength instead, I believe, from another source. White Supremacy provides a judicious, perceptive, and dispassionate synthesis of the remarkably rich body of scholarship on American race relations that has appeared over the last two decades. To this it adds a deeply informative survey of the complex racial history of South Africa. Fredrickson’s mastery of the literature on two societies, and his own talents as a historian, more than the comparison itself, are what make this book work.

Nor does Fredrickson make clear where this comparison of two societies hitherto rarely linked should carry us in the future. Conspicuously absent from this book is the sort of concluding chapter that it seems to require: a set of final judgments and further reflections capable of pulling together the complex themes it has so carefully developed and explaining their significance. Early reviewers have uniformly praised the sophistication of Fredrickson’s comparisons, but they too have stopped short of identifying “the new problems of interpretation” that at the outset he promises to raise.

Once considered, then, the American-South African analogy seems to exhaust itself. It is for this reason that one may doubt whether White Supremacy, though an important book, will also prove an influential one.

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Chicago, Illinois — Andy has little time to chitchat. There are hundreds of hot towels to sort and fold, and when that’s done, there are yet more to wash and dry. The 41-year-old is one of half a dozen laundry-room workers at Misericordia, a community for people with disabilities in the Windy City. He and his colleagues, all of whom are intellectually disabled and reside on the Misericordia “campus,” know that their work has purpose, and they delight in each task and every busy hour.

In addition to his job at the laundry room, Andy holds two others. “For two days I work at Sacred Heart”—a nearby Catholic school—“and at Target. Target is a store, a big super-store. At Sacred Heart, I sweep floors and tables.”

“Ah, so you’re the janitor there?” I follow up.

“No, no! I just clean. I love working there.”

Andy’s packed schedule is typical for the higher-functioning residents at Misericordia, many of whom juggle multiple jobs. Their work at Misericordia helps meet real community needs—laundry, recycling, gardening, cooking, baking, and so on—while preparing residents for the private labor market. Andy has already found competitive employment (at Target), but many others rely on Misericordia’s own programs to stay active and employed.

Yet if progressive lawmakers and minimum-wage crusaders have their way, many of these opportunities would disappear, along with the Depression-era law which makes them possible.

The law, Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, permits employers to pay people with disabilities a specialized wage based on their ability to perform various jobs. It thus encourages the hiring of the disabled while ensuring that they are paid a wage commensurate with their productivity. The law safeguards against abuse by, among other things, requiring employers to regularly review and adjust wages as disabled employees make productivity gains. Many of these employers are nonprofit entities that exist solely to provide meaningful work for the disabled.

Only 20 percent of Americans with disabilities participate in the labor force. The share is even smaller among those with intellectual and developmental disabilities. For this group, work isn’t mainly about money—most of the Misericordia residents are oblivious to how much they get paid—so much as it is about purpose and community. What the disabled seek from work is “the feeling of safety, the opportunity to work alongside friends, and an atmosphere of kindness and understanding,” says Scott Mendel, chairman of Together for Choice, which campaigns for freedom of choice for the disabled and their families. (Mendel’s daughter, who has cerebral palsy, lives and works at Misericordia.)

Abstract principles of economic justice, divorced from economic realities and the lived experience of people with disabilities, are a recipe for disaster in this area. Yet that’s the approach taken by too many progressives these days.

Last month, for example, seven Senate progressives led by Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts wrote a letter to Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta denouncing Section 14(c) for setting “low expectations for workers with disabilities” and relegating them to “second-class” status. The senators also took issue with so-called sheltered workshops, like those at Misericordia, which are specifically designed to help the disabled find pathways to market employment. Activists at the state level, meanwhile, continue to press for the abolition of such programs, and they have already succeeded in restricting or limiting them in a number of jurisdictions, most notably in Pennsylvania, where such settings have been all but eliminated.

While there have been a few, notorious cases of 14(c) and sheltered-workshop abuse over the years, existing law provides mechanisms for punishing firms for misconduct. Getting rid of 14(c) and sheltered workshops, however, could potentially leave hundreds of thousands of disabled people unemployed. Activists have yet to explain what it is they expect these newly jobless to do with their time.

Competitive employment simply isn’t an option for many of the most disabled. And even those like Andy, who are employed in the private economy, tend to work at most 20 hours a week at their competitive jobs. What would they do with the rest of their time, if sheltered workshops didn’t exist? Most likely, they would “veg out” in front of a television. Squeezing 14(c) program and forcing private employers to pay minimum wage to workers whose productivity falls far short of the norm wouldn’t improve the lot of the disabled; it would leave them jobless.

Economic reality is reality no less for the disabled.

Nor have progressives accounted for the effects on the lives of the disabled in jurisdictions that have restricted sheltered workshops. “None of these states have done an adequate job of ascertaining whether these actions actually enhanced the quality of life for the individuals affected,” a study in the Social Improvement Journal concluded last year. Less time in sheltered workshops, the study found, “was not replaced with a corollary increase in the use of more integrated forms of employment.” Rather, “these individuals were essentially unemployed, engaging in made-up day activities.”

Make-work is not what Andy and his colleagues are up to today at Misericordia. They complete real tasks, which benefit their fellow residents in concrete ways. “This work is training, but it also gives them meaning,” one Misericordia director told me. “It’s not just doing meaningless work, but it’s going toward something. We’re not setting them up to do something that someone else takes apart. This is something that’s needed.” Yet, in the name of economic justice, progressives are on the verge of depriving men and women like Andy of the dignity of work and the freedom of choice that non-disabled Americans take for granted.

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To paraphrase New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (with apologies), the less Republicans do in office, the more popular they generally become. That is, when the GOP exists solely in voters’ minds as a bulwark against cultural and political liberalism, it can cobble together a winning coalition. Likewise, Democrats regain the national trust when they serve only as an obstacle to Republican objectives. It’s when both parties begin to talk about what they want to do with their power that they get into trouble.

That is an over-simplification, but the core thesis is an astute one. In an age of negative partisanship and without an acute foreign or domestic crisis to focus the national mind, it’s not unreasonable to presume that both parties’ chief value is defined in negative terms by the public. Considering how little of the national dialogue has to do with policy these days, general principles and heuristics are probably how most marginal voters navigate the political environment.

Somewhere along the way, though, Democrats managed to convince themselves that they cannot just be the anti-Donald Trump party. Their most influential members have become convinced that the party needs to articulate a positive agenda beyond a set of vague principles. For the moment, Democrats who merely want to present themselves as unobjectionable alternatives to Trumpism without going into much broader detail appear to be losing the argument.

According to a study of campaign-season advertisements released on Friday by the USA Today Network and conducted by Kantar Media’s Campaign Marketing Analysis Group, Democrats are not leaning into their opposition to Trump. While over 44,000 pro-Trump advertisements from Republican candidates have aired on local broadcast networks, only about 20,000 Democratic ads have highlighted a candidate’s anti-Trump bona fides. “Trump has been mentioned in 27 [percent] of Democratic ads for Congress, overwhelmingly in a negative light,” the study revealed. In the same period during the 2014 midterm election cycle, by contrast, 60 percent of Republican advertisements featured President Barack Obama in a negative light.

There are plenty of caveats that should prevent observers from drawing too many broad conclusions about what this means. First, comparing the political environment in 2018 to 2014 is apples and oranges. Recall that 2014 was Barack Obama’s second midterm election, so naturally enthusiasm among the incumbent party’s base to rally to the president’s defense wanes while the “out-party’s” anxiety over the incumbent president grows. If Donald Trump’s job-approval rating is still anemic in September, it is reasonable to expect that Republican candidates will soft-peddle their support for the president just as Democrats did in 2010. Second, Democrats running against Democrats in a Democratic primary race may not feel the need to emphasize their opposition to the president, since that doesn’t create a stark enough contrast with their opponent.

And yet, the net effect of the primary season is the same. Democrats aren’t just informing voters of their opposition to how Trump and the Republican Party have managed the nation’s affairs; they’re describing what they would do differently. By and large, the Democratic Party’s agenda consists of “doubling” spending on social-welfare programs, education, and infrastructure, and promising a series of five-year-plan prestige projects. But Democratic candidates are also leaning heavily into divisive social issues.

The themes that Democratic ads have embraced so far range from support for new gun-control measures (“f*** the NRA,” was one New Mexico candidate’s message), to protecting public funding for Planned Parenthood, to promoting support for same-sex marriage rights, to attacking Sinclair Broadcasting (which happened to own the network on which that particular ad ran). A number of Democratic candidates are running on their support for a single-payer health-care system, including the progressive candidate in Nebraska’s GOP-leaning 2nd Congressional District who narrowly defeated an establishment-backed former House member this week, putting that seat farther out of the reach of Democrats in November.

In the end, messages like these animate the Democratic Party’s progressive base, but they have the potential to alienate swing voters. That may not be enough to overcome the electorate’s tendency to reward the “out-party” in a president’s first midterm election. And yet, the risk Democrats run by being specific about what they actually want to do with renewed political power cannot be dismissed. Democrats in the activist base are convinced that embracing conflict-ridden identity politics is a moral imperative, and the party’s establishmentarian leaders appear to believe that being anti-Trump is not enough to ensure the party’s success in November. All the while, the Democratic Party’s position in the polls continues to deteriorate.

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A running theme in Jonah Goldberg’s fantastic new book, Suicide of the West, is the extent to which those who were bequeathed the blessings associated with classically liberal capitalist models of governance are cursed with crippling insecurity. Western economic and political advancement has followed a consistently upward trajectory, albeit in fits and starts. Yet, the chief beneficiaries of this unprecedented prosperity seem unaware of that fact. In boom or bust, the verdict of many in the prosperous West remains the same: the capitalist model is flawed and failing.

Capitalism’s detractors are as likely to denounce the exploitative nature of free markets during a downturn as they are to lament the displacement and disorientation that follows when the economy roars. The bottom line is static; only the emphasis changes. Though this tendency is a bipartisan one, capitalism’s skeptics are still more at home on the left. With the lingering effects of the Great Recession all but behind us, the liberal argument against capitalism’s excesses has shifted from mitigating the effects on low-skilled workers to warnings about the pernicious effects of prosperity.

Matthew Stewart’s expansive piece in The Atlantic this month is a valuable addition to the genre. In it, Stewart attacks the rise of a permanent aristocracy resulting from the plague of “income inequality,” but his argument is not a recitation of the Democratic Party’s 2012 election themes. It isn’t just the mythic “1 percent,” (or, in the author’s estimation, the “top 0.1 percent”) but the top 9.9 percent that has not only accrued unearned benefits from capitalist society but has fixed the system to ensure that those benefits are hereditary.

Stewart laments the rise of a new Gilded Age in America, which is anecdotally exemplified by his own comfort and prosperity—a spoil he appears to view as plunder stolen from the blue-collar service providers he regularly patronizes. You see, he is a member of a new aristocracy, which leverages its economic and social capital to wall itself off from the rest of the world and preserves its influence. He and those like him have “mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children.” This corruption and Stewart’s insecurity is, he contends, a product of consumerism. “The traditional story of economic growth in America has been one of arriving, building, inviting friends, and building some more,” Stewart wrote. “The story we’re writing looks more like one of slamming doors shut behind us and slowly suffocating under a mass of commercial-grade kitchen appliances.”

Though he diverges from the kind of scientistic Marxism reanimated by Thomas Piketty, Stewart nevertheless appeals to some familiar Soviet-style dialectical materialism. “Inequality necessarily entrenches itself through other, nonfinancial, intrinsically invidious forms of wealth and power,” he wrote. “We use these other forms of capital to project our advantages into life itself.” In this way, Stewart can have it all. The privilege enjoyed by the aristocracy is a symptom of Western capitalism’s sickness, but so, too, are the advantages bestowed on the underprivileged. Affirmative action programs in schools, for example, function in part to “indulge rich people in the belief that their college is open to all on the basis of merit.”

It goes on like this for another 13,000 words and, thus, has the strategic advantage of being impervious to a comprehensive rebuttal outside of a book. Stewart does make some valuable observations about entrenched interests, noxious rent-seekers, and the perils of empowering the state to pick economic winners and losers. Where his argument runs aground is his claim that meritocracy in America is an illusion. Capitalism is, he says, a brutal zero-sum game in which true advancement is rendered unattainable by unseen forces is a foundational plank of the liberal American ethos. This is not new. Not new at all.

Much of Stewart’s thesis can be found in a 2004 report in The Economist, which alleges that the American upper-middle-class has created a set of “sticky” conditions that preserve their status and result in what Teddy Roosevelt warned could become an American version of a “hereditary aristocracy.” In 2013, the American economist Joseph Stiglitz warned that the American dream is dead, and the notion that the United States is a place of opportunity is a myth. “Since capitalism required losers, the myth of the melting pot was necessary to promote the belief in individual mobility through hard work and competition,” read a line from a 1973 edition of a National Council for the Social Studies-issued handbook for teachers. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which for some reason produces a curriculum for teachers, has long recommended that educators advise students poverty is a result of systemic factors and not individual choices. Even today, a cottage industry has arisen around the notion that Western largess is decadence, that meritocracy is a myth, and that arguments to the contrary are acts of subversion.

The belief that American meritocracy is a myth persists despite wildly dynamic conditions on the ground. As the Brookings Institution noted, 60 percent of employed black women in 1940 worked as household servants, compared with just 2.2 percent today. In between 1940 and 1970, “black men cut the income gap by about a third,” wrote Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom in 1998. The black professional class, ranging from doctors to university lecturers, exploded in the latter half of the 20th Century, as did African-American home ownership and life expectancy rates. The African-American story is not unique. The average American income in 1990 was just $23,730 annually. Today, it’s $58,700—a figure that well outpaces inflation and that outstrips most of the developed world. The American middle-class is doing just fine, but that experience has not come at the expense of Americans at or near the poverty line. As the economic recovery began to take hold in 2014, poverty rates declined precipitously across the board, though that effect was more keenly felt by minority groups which recovered at faster rates than their white counterparts.

As National Review’s Max Bloom pointed out last year, 13 of the world’s top 25 universities and 21 of the world’s 50 largest universities are located in America. The United States attracts substantial foreign investment, inflating America’s much-misunderstood trade deficit. The influx of foreign immigrants and legal permanent residents streaming into America looking to take advantage of its meritocratic system rivals or exceeds immigration rates at the turn of the 20th Century. You could be forgiven for concluding that American meritocracy is self-evident to all who have not been informed of the general liberal consensus. Indeed, according to an October 2016 essay in The Atlantic by Victor Tan Chen, the United States so “fetishizes” meritocracy that it has become “exhausting” and ultimately “harmful” to its “egalitarian ideals.”

Stewart is not wrong that there has been a notable decline in economic mobility in this decade. That condition is attributable to many factors, ranging from the collapse of the mortgage market to the erosion of the nuclear family among lower-to middle-class Americans (a charge supported by none-too-conservative venues like the New York Times and the Brookings Institution). But Mr. Stewart will surely rejoice in the discovery that downward economic mobility is alive and well among the upper class. National Review’s Kevin Williamson observed in March of this year that the Forbes billionaires list includes remarkably few heirs to old money. “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, inherited wealth accounts for about 15 percent of the assets of the wealthiest Americans,” he wrote. Moreover, that list is not static; it churns, and that churn is reflective of America’s economic dynamism. In 2017, for example, “hedge fund managers have been displaced over the last two years not only by technology billionaires but by a fish stick king, meat processor, vodka distiller, ice tea brewer and hair care products peddler.”

There is plenty to be said in favor of America’s efforts to achieve meritocracy, imperfect as those efforts may be. But so few seem to be touting them, preferring instead to peddle the idea that the ideal of success in America is a hollow simulacrum designed to fool its citizens into toiling toward no discernable end. Stewart’s piece is a fine addition to a saturated marketplace in which consumers are desperate to reward purveyors of bad news. Here’s to his success.

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We try, we really do try, to sort through the increasingly problematic “Russian collusion” narrative and establish a timeline of sorts—and figure out what’s real and what’s nonsense. Do we succeed? Give a listen.

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On July 4, 1863, Rabbi Sabato Morais of Philadelphia’s Mikveh Israel congregation ascended the pulpit to deliver the Sabbath sermon. Those assembled in the synagogue knew that over the previous few days, Union and Confederate forces had been engaged in an epic engagement at Gettysburg, but they had no idea who had won or whether Confederate forces would continue onward to Washington or Philadelphia. That year, July 4 coincided with the 17th of Tammuz, when Jews commemorate the Roman breach of the walls of Jerusalem. Morais prayed that God not allow Jerusalem’s fate to befall the American capital and assured his audience that he had not forgotten the joyous date on which he spoke: “I am not indifferent, my dear friends, to the event, which, four score and seven years ago, brought to this new world light and joy.”

An immigrant from Italy, Morais had taught himself English utilizing the King James Bible. Few Americans spoke in this manner, including Abraham Lincoln. Three days later, the president himself reflected before an audience: “How long ago is it?—eighty-odd years—since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’” Only several months later, at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery, would Lincoln refer to the birth of our nation in Morais’s manner, making “four score and seven years ago” one of the most famous phrases in the English language and thereby endowing his address with a prophetic tenor and scriptural quality.

This has led historians, including Jonathan Sarna and Marc Saperstein, to suggest that Lincoln may have read Morais’s sermon, which had been widely circulated. Whether or not this was so, the Gettysburg address parallels Morais’s remarks in that it, too, joins mourning for the fallen with a recognition of American independence, allowing those who had died to define our appreciation for the day that our “forefathers brought forth a new nation conceived in liberty.” Lincoln’s words stressed that a nation must always link civic celebration of its independence with the lives given on its behalf. Visiting the cemetery at Gettysburg, he argued, requires us to dedicate ourselves to the unfinished work that “they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” He went on: “From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion,” thereby ensuring that “these dead shall not have died in vain.”

The literary link between Morais’s recalling of Jerusalem and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address makes it all the more striking that it is the Jews of today’s Judea who make manifest the lessons of Lincoln’s words. Just as the battle of Gettysburg concluded on July 3, Israelis hold their Memorial Day commemorations on the day before their Independence Day celebrations.On the morning of the Fourth of Iyar, a siren sounds throughout the land, with all pausing their everyday activities in reverent memory of those who had died. There are few more stunning images of Israel today than those of highways on which thousands of cars grind to a halt, all travelers standing at the roadside, and all heads bowing in commemoration. Throughout the day, cemeteries are visited by the family members of those lost. Only in the evening does the somber Yom Hazikaron give way to the joy of the Fifth of Iyar’s Yom Ha’atzmaut, Independence Day.For anyone who has experienced it, the two days define each other. Those assembled in Israel’s cemeteries facing the unbearable loss of loved ones do so in the knowledge that it is the sacrifice of their beloved family members that make the next day’s celebration of independence possible. And the celebration of independence is begun with the acknowledgement by millions of citizens that those who lie in those cemeteries, who gave “their last full measure of devotion,” obligate the living to ensure that the dead did not die in vain.

The American version of Memorial Day, like the Gettysburg Address itself, began as a means of decorating and honoring the graves of Civil War dead. It is unconnected to the Fourth of July, which takes place five weeks later. Both holidays are observed by many (though not all) Americans as escapes from work, and too few ponder the link between the sacrifice of American dead and the freedom that we the living enjoy. There is thus no denying that the Israelis’ insistence on linking their Independence Day celebration with their Memorial Day is not only more appropriate; it is more American, a truer fulfillment of Lincoln’s message at Gettysburg.

In studying the Hebrew calendar of 1776, I was struck by the fact that the original Fourth of July, like that of 1863, fell on the 17th of Tammuz. It is, perhaps, another reminder that Gettysburg and America’s birth must always be joined in our minds, and linked in our civic observance. It is, of course, beyond unlikely that Memorial Day will be moved to adjoin the fourth of July. Yet that should not prevent us from learning from the Israeli example. Imagine if the third of July were dedicated to remembering the battle that concluded on that date.Imagine if “Gettysburg Day” involved a brief moment of commemoration by “us, the living” for those who gave the last full measure of devotion.Imagine if tens—perhaps hundreds—of millions of Americans paused in unison from their leisure activities for a minute or two to reflect on the sacrifice of generations past. Surely our observance of the Independence Day that followed could not fail to be affected; surely the Fourth of July would be marked in a manner more worthy of a great nation.

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